A new memoir recounts the making of Chez Panisse.

Melanie Rehak

Coming to My Senses:

The Making of a Counterculture Cook

by Alice Waters

Clarkson Potter

$27.00 List Price

In 1979, Werner Herzog made good on a promise to eat his shoe. A few years earlier, Errol Morris, a protégé of Herzog’s in Berkeley, California, had been struggling to finish his first film. Herzog promised that if Morris got it done, he’d consume some footwear. Morris ultimately delivered Gates of Heaven, the documentary about the pet-cemetery business that launched his career; Herzog, true to his word, entered the kitchen with a pair of leather boots. He stuffed whole heads of garlic into the toes, added liberal doses of hot sauce, and tossed the concoction into a pot along with heaps of fresh rosemary sprigs. All this was documented by yet another Berkeley filmmaker, Les Blank, in a short film called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (which gave Herzog the opportunity to utter ur-Herzogian statements like “We have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television”).

After Herzog finishes seasoning and stirring his boots, the camera cuts to a woman who offers some sensible culinary advice. “It should be like a pig’s foot,” she explains. “The leather should all soften up . . . and you can serve it with something like beans or chili and lots of onions sprinkled on top and a little raw garlic and some spices.” The woman is Alice Waters. The kitchen they’re in is at her restaurant, Chez Panisse, which she had opened eight years previously, at the age of twenty-seven. The restaurant had become a hangout for the Berkeley film and arts crowd, as well as for food-centric people. In some cases, the two groups were interchangeable. In her new memoir, Coming to My

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